Canadian attempts to prod the edge of the city on Nov. 10 “met spirited reminders that the enemy was still there,” G.W.L. Nicholson writes in Canada’s official history. At the outskirts of the city, Mills and some of his friends in the 42nd Battalion rushed into a brick building for shelter. Then a shell burst nearby – Mills had been hit.

“I saw he had a fearful wound on his stomach,” Will Bird writes in his memoir
Ghosts have Warm Hands.
“He died as we looked at him.”

Mills’s brother was there, wild with anguish.

“He says he's going to shoot whoever arranged to have his brother killed for nothing,” one of the soldiers told Bird. “He really means it. He’s hoping Currie comes here today. If he doesn’t, he’s going to shoot the next higher-up. He says his brother was murdered.”

The Germans had occupied Mons since 1914, when the British Forces fought their first battle of the war, before retreating towards the Marne. It was a symbolic place for the Canadians to end the war, and part of the continued advance east. In the final days of the war, as rumours of an armistice swirled, Currie ordered the capture of the city through “an encircling approach,” Tim Cook writes in
Shock Troops
. “No senior officers questioned Currie’s orders at the time, although a decade after the war the corps commander would be forced to defend his reputation in a nasty, slanderous libel case.”

After the Canadians crossed into Belgium on Nov. 7, and in fighting up to Nov. 10, there had been 645 casualties “in just the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions,” Cook writes, noting that on Nov. 11, at least 14 Canadians were killed, 70 wounded, and two missing in the 3rd Division, which included the two groups advancing into the city: the 42nd Battalion and the Royal Canadian Regiment.

In 1919, in the House of Commons, the bombastic Sir Sam Hughes, former minister of militia, implied that Currie should have been court-martialed for Mons, Robert Sharpe writes in
The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial.
Hughes had been a thorn in Currie’s side for years, especially after Currie refused to support the promotion of his son Garnet to divisional commander.

Canadian Official Photographs

Canadian Corps Commander Arthur Currie, second from left, was criticized for aggressive moves in the war's last days.

“You cannot find one Canadian soldier returning from France who will not curse the name of the officer who ordered the attack on Mons,” Hughes said in March 1919, protected by parliamentary privilege. “It had no strategic value, and the attack was only a bit of bravado as the Canadians had already passed it.”

Currie, who was principal of McGill University after the war, had been “deeply hurt” by attacks like this, Sharpe writes. In 1927, when a memorial plaque honouring the Canadian liberation was unveiled in Mons, the Port Hope (Ont.) Evening Guide published “an editorial charging ‘deliberate and useless waste of human life’ in the capture of the town,” Canada’s official history of the war notes.

The passionate editorial was written by William Thomas Rochester Preston with the approval of publisher Frederick W. Wilson.

Currie had wanted vindication and now had a chance. His friends at McGill urged him not to sue, Sharpe notes. Currie was a forthright man, not the sort that could imagine his bathing habits would be a national discussion, as transcripts from Sharpe’s book show:

“Did you finish your bath?” Frank Regan, lawyer for the publisher, asked Currie about the morning of Nov. 11.

“I don’t know; I don’t know that. I probably did finish it.”

“The mere fact that the war was going to stop didn’t interfere with your ablutions?”

“That is not all right Mr. Regan. You are asking me to be careful about my insinuations, I suggest that you obey your own behest.”

The 1928 trial captivated Canada. Soldiers and generals testified for both sides over the number of bodies — whose identity was disputed — seen on the road into Mons, what their orders had been, the timing of the battle.

“Don’t you think, Sir Arthur, that in the dying hours of the war you might have spared your men a trifle more than you did?” Regan asked.

“No you are the man that is suggesting that those men who did that should lie down and quit within two days of the final victory,” Currie replied.

Preston, the author of the editorial, represented himself, asking his questions in a quiet, level tone of voice, the Star reported.

He asked if Currie had heard the rumours of unrest in Canada over the taking of Mons, the talk from Hughes.

“Even severe as Sir Sam Hughes was, he did not go so far as you did Mr. Preston … He did not say that I did it for my own glorification: you did. He did not say that my soldiers were there with their rifles ready to shoot me down: you did.”

“Common talk, common rumour,” Preston replied.

Currie found the trial humiliating. It was his final battle of the war, and he confided to a friend that he suffered a “complete nervous breakdown,” Sharpe writes.

Currie told the court that he had not ordered an attack on Mons, but an advance, under orders to continually pursue the Germans. “In those days our instructions were not to force in case of too strenuous opposition.”

Before the trial was over, Currie received a supportive telegram from the father of George Price, the last Canadian killed in the war – and the only Canadian referenced as a Nov. 11 death at the trial. James Price wished Currie well and wrote that “… all this simply renews old wounds that are better forgotten.”

Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

Ionut Stoica, left, of Romania, and his friend Jonathan Gailliez rub the medieval brass monkey at city hall for good luck.

The jury found in favour of Currie, but only awarded him $500, not the $50,000 he had sought.

“At the trial responsible and informed testimony established that the attack on Mons was both justifiable and necessary, the Corps Commander’s task being to press the enemy as hard as he could until ordered to stop,” Nicholson writes in Canada’s official history. “It was further shown that General Currie had given explicit orders that there should be no large scale attack and that as far as possible casualties and losses were to be avoided.”

Currie was greeted with cheers in the streets of Port Hope. At a hotel, he thanked everyone with “tears streamed down his cheeks and he seemed hardly able to speak,” Sharpe writes.

Richard Lautens has been walking the Western Front of WW1 with Katie Daubs for several months. He has also brought along the letters of his Great Great Uncle Harry. In a final blog, Richard talks about what became of Harry at the end of the war.

In a tunnel at Mons city hall, the bronze plaque commemorating the Canadian liberation is just another part of the fabric of the city, near a monkey statue that is supposed to bring luck to those who rub its head with their left hand. The teenagers kissing beside the plaque are likely oblivious to the chain of events it caused in Canada.

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